So I'm super excited that an essay of mine just went live on AOL's ParentDish! I wrote about how the quilt I made inspired my toddler Max to (finally) start talking. Because of a little copyright thing called exclusivity, I can't reproduce the essay here, but you can read it here at ParentDish!

I can give you the gist though! In a nutshell, it's like this: Max seemed behind (in my very un-objective view) on his language development, and I was obsessing over getting him to just flippin' talk already. Then, unrelated, I made a big patchwork quilt for my bed. And suddenly Max had something to talk about and bam, his language development kicked in. Okay, I say it better than that in the essay, I promise. I have to give props to my friend, Kristine, for suggesting that I write this essay. I posted about the quilt to my little writer's group, and she was like, um, duh, you're a writer and you need to write about this (of course, she said it much nicer than that).

I really do love this quilt. I made it fairly large, enough to cover our queen bed, plus have extra for overhang. I think the finished dimensions are something like 96 by 104. I just know it was a whole lot of fabric to deal with. But the assembly was easy: I just cut out bunches of 9" squares and patch-worked them all together. I would have loved to have sent it out for professional quilting, but the straight-stitch machine quilting will do. I backed it with a pretty seersucker.